Zach Abrams, the founder of stablecoin company Bridge, admits he was surprised when the bulk of his business ended up coming from non-U.S. markets in Latin America, Europe, and Africa.
“We were very U.S.-centric. We didn’t know what the opportunities were in the Philippines, Africa, or Latin America,” Abrams says. “Unbeknownst to us, there was all this pent up demand outside the U.S. to build with stablecoins.” The firm’s first customers asked it to build cross-border payment infrastructure between the U.S. and Colombia and to facilitate payouts into countries like Venezuela and the Philippines.
Bridge’s rapid rise was driven by regions that featured high friction across borders, like Latin America. Now part of Stripe, Abrams argues that the next phase of growth could come from tokenizing non-dollar currencies.
Today’s stablecoin sector is dominated by coins denominated in the U.S. dollar, with these tokens making up over 95% of all transactions. That’s unnerved governments outside the U.S., who fear that the rise of stablecoins might reinforce the U.S. dollar’s existing dominance in global trade and financial flows.
Yet Abrams argues that U.S. dollar dominance may just reflect the immaturity of the stablecoin space. “We’re in the early stages,” Abrams says. “But in a world where more and more of our infrastructure is tokenized, it’s going to be incredibly important to have tokenized local currencies.”
Abrams explains that local businesses will want to hold a local currency stablecoin, and put some of their capital to work in a digital, yield-generating investments. “Businesses in Singapore are going to want to hold tokenized Singapore dollars, so they can convert them into Treasuries or other assets to earn yield,” he explains.
Bridge doesn’t yet support the Singapore dollar; it currently supports tokenized euros, Mexican pesos, and British pounds, and will soon allow Brazilian reais stablecoins.
Abrams cofounded Bridge in San Francisco in 2021 with Sean Yu, now the firm’s chief technology officer. The duo made an early bet that stablecoins would become mainstream payment infrastructure, given that they offer a way of moving money that is “way cheaper and faster” than existing rails.
SpaceX, for example, taps Bridge’s technology to repatriate earnings from Starlink, its satellite internet service, back to the U.S. (The technology is especially favored in rural areas in emerging markets, where traditional providers cannot reach.) By 2024, Bridge was processing payment volume at an annualized rate of more than $5 billion., and raised $58 million from VC firms like Sequoia and Haun Ventures.
Stripe acquired Bridge in 2024 for $1.1 billion, in what was then its largest acquisition. (This has since been surpassed by Stripe’s purchase of OpenRouter, an AI model gateway, for a reported price of over $7 billion.)
Abrams wants Bridge to do for tokenization what Stripe did for online payments: Provide a single “simplification layer” on top of a complex mess of different options. “Bridge is betting that the tokenized world is going to become really important,” he says. “There will be a complexity of things…Bridge can be that simplification layer.”
Asia’s key financial hubs, like Singapore and Hong Kong, are rolling out new regulatory frameworks for stablecoins, even as major economies like China and India have taken a skeptical stance on digital currencies in general.
“The region is warming to stablecoins, but it’s not as warm as the U.S. yet,” Abrams says. “It’s all very dependent on what’s permissible…as the regulatory environment catches up, I think there will be a lot more use cases that are made possible.”
Abrams draws a parallel between Latin America and Asia, two regions which both have growing middle classes, rapid urbanization, and a strong reliance on international trade.
“Stablecoin adoption is so big in Brazil because so much of their economy involves cross-border business, while the regulatory environment supports a pretty dynamic crypto ecosystem,” he explains, emphasizing that cross-border money transfer, rather than domestic transactions, is the real opportunity for stablecoins. “Singapore and a lot of other countries in the region share very similar characteristics, and that’s why I’m optimistic that the markets here will be similarly important as stablecoins scale.”